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Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Specialist for the IBM System Storage product line at the
IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor
to IBM's developerWorks. In 2011, Tony celebrated his 25th year anniversary with IBM Storage on the same day as the IBM's Centennial. He is
author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services. You can also follow him on Twitter @az990tony.
(Short URL for this blog: ibm.co/Pearson
)

This week I am in Costa Rica to celebrate[Earth Day] and promote IBM's [Smarter Planet strategy] to help solve the world's energy and environmental problems. This is thethird in the series. The first two posts were:

Here in Costa Rica, they separate their recyclables, and encourage even the hotel guests from other countries to do the same. See my photo on the left for an example.

This is more than most in the United States will do. We're lucky to get North Americans to just separate all recyclables in one bin separate from all trash in a second bin.

Leaving Arenal, I went to Escazu, a suburb of San Jose, the capital of this country. I met with Patrick, one of the owners of [Exclusive Excursions Travel] that helped me organize the eco-tourism portion of this trip to Costa Rica.

Most people are familiar with the [star rating system] that rank most hotels from one star (budget class/economy) to five stars (deluxe/luxury). The nicest hotel I've been to was the [Burj Al Arab] in Dubai, which claims a seven star rating. For eco-tourism, there is a similar "Green Leaf" rating system. According to Patrick,the Instituto Costarricense de Turismo [ICT] (tourism board of Costa Rica) rates hotels from one leaf (adopting some measures, like separating recyclables shown above) to five leaves (entirely carbon neutral).This Green Leaf system seems more important to European and Canadian tourists, but those from United States may not even be aware of it.

The food at these hotels vary. The typical dish here for breakfast, lunch and dinner is the Casado, consisting of mostly rice and beans. I have found thatCosta Rica has come up with as many creative ways to combine rice and beans in various proportions as Starbucks® serve various combinations of coffee and milk.The locals might be accustomed to a steady diet of rice and beans for every meal of every day, but those of us from North America aren't! Not counting tourist flatulence, Costa Rica has[pledged to be carbon neutral by 2021], the country's 200th birthday.

Sadly, most folks in the United States don't categorize their hotels with a Green Leaf rating system, nor do they even bother to categorize their recyclables. I spent 18 months in the field doing Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) assessments for clients, and most didn't categorize their data either.So, the next time you have some combination of coffee and milk, whether its a Latte, Misto, Espresso, or Macchiato, remember that the coffee came from acountry trying to be more environmentally responsible, grown by a farmerwho eats a simple diet of rice and beans, and has no problem separating different categories of recyclables. Perhaps you will remember to separate your data, and store it on an information infrastructure based on an environmentally-responsible combination of SSD, FC, SATA and tape, to reduce your costs and minimize your carbon footprint.

We've been quite busy here at the Tucson Executive Briefing Center. I am often asked to explain the relationship between IBM's various storage products. While automakers don't have to explain why they sell sports coupes, pickup trucks and minivans, this analogy does not adequately cover IT storage products. So, I have come up with a new analogy that seems to be a better fit: foundations and flavorings.

All over the world, meals are often comprised of a foundation, perhaps rice, potatoes or pasta, covered with some form of flavoring, sauces, pieces of meat or fish, grated cheese and spices. In Puerto Rico, I had dishes where the foundation was mashed bananas called [plantains]. Sandwich shops often let you pick your choice of bread, the foundation, and then your meats and cheeses, the flavorings.At our local steakhouse,[McMahon's], the menulists a set of steaks, the foundation such as Rib Eye, Filet Mignon, Prime Rib or New York Strip, andvarious flavorings, such as sauces and rubs to cover the steak. Last night, I had the Delmonico steak with the Cristiani sauce consisting of Portobello mushrooms, garlic and aged Romano cheese.

This serves as a useful analogy for IBM's storage strategy. Allowing thefoundations and flavorings to be separately orderable greatly simplifies the selection menu and providesa nearly any-to-any approach to meeting a variety of client needs.Let's take a look at both.

Foundations

IBM's foundation products are the DS family [DS3000, DS4000, DS5000, DS6000 and DS8000 series], [DS9900 series], and [XIV] for disk, and the TS family [TS1000, TS2000, TS3000] series for tape drives and libraries. In much thesame way you might prefer brown rice instead of white rice, or linguine instead of penne pasta, you might find the attributes of one storagefoundation more attractive based on its performance, scalability and availability features for yourparticular application workloads.

Fellow IBM blogger Barry Whyte discusses SVC at great length on his [Storage Virtualization] blog. Flavoring disk foundation storage with SAN Volume Controller can provide you additionalfeatures and functions, and help improve the scalability, performance or availability characteristics.For example, if you have DS4000, DS8000 and XIV, you might use SVC to provide a consistent methodologyfor asynchronous replication, a form of consistent "flavoring" if you will.

N series Gateways

The [N series gateways] offerflavoring to disk foundation, including unified NAS, iSCSI and FCP protocol host attachment, and application aware capabilities. (As for our IBM N series appliances or "filers", these could be foundational storage behind an SVC, but that's perhaps a topic for another post.)

SoFS provides a global namespace with clustered NAS access to files. This is a blended disk-and-tape solution with built-in backup and Information Lifecycle Management [ILM]. Policies can be used to place different files onto different tiers of storage, automate the movement from tier to tier, including migration to tape, and even expiration when the data is no longer needed.

DR550

The [IBM System Storage DR550] provides Non-erasable, Non-rewriteable (NENR) flavoring to storage. While the DR550 comes with internal disk storage, it can front end a tape library filled with WORM cartridges. The DR550 hasbeen paired up with small libraries (TS3200 or TS3310) as well as larger libraries like the TS3500.

Grid Access

The IBM Grid Medical Archive Solution [GMAS] provides a variety of capabilities for storing and accessing medical images, using a blended disk-and-tape approach. This allows hospital and clinicnetworks to provide access for doctors and radiologists from multiple locations.

Many of the flavorings are called "gateways". The IBM TS7650G flavors disk that provides a virtualtape library[VTL] with inline data deduplication capability. Recent performance tests pairing the TS7650G flavoring with XIV foundation storage found this combination to be an excellent match.

Let me know what you think. Does this help you understand IBM's storage strategy and acquisitions? Enteryour comments below.

Wrapping up this week's theme on ways to make the planet smarter, and less confusing, I present IBM's third annual [five in five]. These are five IBM innovations to watch over the next five years, all of which have implications on information storage. Here is a quick [3-minute video] that provides the highlights:

TKLM is supported on AIX, Solaris, Windows, Red Hat and SUSE Linux. IBM plans to offer TKLM forz/OS in 2009. TKLM can be used with Firefox or Internet Explorer web browser. This will include the Encryption Key Manager (EKM) that IBM offered initially to support encryption keys for the TS1120, TS1130, and LTO-4 drives.

While this is needed today for tape, IBM positions this software to also manage the encryption keys for "Full Drive Encryption" (FDE) disk drive modules (DDM) in IBM disk systems in 2009.

There's some good discussion in the comments section over at Robin Harris' StorageMojo blog for hispost [Building a 1.8 Exabyte Data Center].To summarize, a student is working on a research archive and asked Robin Harris for his opinion. The archive will consist of 20-40 million files averaging 90 GB in size each, for a total of 1800 PB or 1.8 EB. By comparison, anIBM DS8300 with five frames tops out at 512TB, so it would take nearly 3600 of these to hold 1.8 EB. While this might seem like a ridiculous amount of data, I think the discussion is valid as our world is certainly headed in that direction.

IBM works with a lot of research firms, and the solution is to put most of this data on tape, with just enough disk for specific analysis. Robin mentions a configurion with Sun Fire 4540 disk systems (aka Thumper). Despite Sun Microsystems' recent [$1.7 Billion dollar quarterly loss], I think even the experts at Sun would recommend a blended disk-and-tape solution for this situation.

Take for example IBM's Scale Out File Services [SoFS] which today handles 2-3 billion files in a single global file system, so 20-40 million would present no problem. SoFS supports a mix of disk and tape, with built-in movement, so that files that were referenced would automatically be moved to disk when needed, and moved back to tape when no longer required, based on policies set by the administrator. Depending on the analysis, you may only need 1 PB or less of disk to perform the work, which can easily be accomplished with a handful of disk systems, such as IBM DS8300 or IBM XIV, for example.

The rest would be on tape. Let's consider using the IBM TS3500 with [S24 High Density] frames. A singleTS3500 tape library with fifteen of these HD frames could hold 45PB of data, assuming 3:1 compression on 1TB-size 3592 cartridges. You wouldneed 40 (forty) of these libraries to get to the full 1800 PB required, and these could hold even more as higher capacity cartridges are developed. IBM has customers with over 40 tape libraries today (not all with these HD frames, of course), but the dimensions and scale that IBM is capable lies within this scope.

This blended disk-and-tape approach would drastically reduce the floorspace and electricity requirements when compared against all-disk configurations discussed in the post.

People are rediscovering tape in a whole new light. ComputerWorld recently came out with an 11-page Technology Brief titled [The Business Value of Tape Storage],sponsored by Dell. (Note: While Dell is a competitor to IBM for some aspects of their business, they OEM their tape storage systems from IBM, so in that respect, I can refer to them as a technology partner.) Here are some excerpts from the ComputerWorld brief:

For IT managers, the question isnot whether to use tape, but whereand how to best use tape as part of acomprehensive, tiered storage architecture.In the modern storage architecture,tape plays a role not onlyin data backup, but also in long-termarchiving and compliance.

“Long-term archiving is the primaryreason any company shoulduse tape these days,” says MikeKarp, senior analyst at EnterpriseManagement Associates in Boulder,Colo. Companies are increasinglylikely to use disk in conjunctionwith tape for backup, but for long-termarchiving needs, tape remainsunbeatable.

After factoring inacquisition costs of equipment andmedia, as well as electricity and datacenter floor space, Clipper Groupfound that the total cost of archivingsolutions based on SATA disk, theleast expensive disk, was up to 23times more expensive than archivingsolutions involving tape. Calculatingenergy costs for the competing approaches,the costs for disk jumpedto 290 times that of tape.

“Tape isalways the winner anywhere costtrumps anything else,” says Karp.No matter how the cost is figured,tape is less expensive.

Beyond IT familiarity with tape,analysts point to other reasons whyorganizations will likely keep tapein their IT storage infrastructures.Energy savings, for example, is themost recent reason to stick withtape. “The economics of tape arepretty compelling, especially whenyou figure in the cost of power,”Schulz says.

So, whether you are planning for an Exabyte-scale data center, or merely questioning the logic of a disk-for-everything storage approach, you might want to consider tape. It's "green" for the environment, and less expensive on your budget.